On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:26:24 -0400, Dan Halbert wrote
listmail wrote:
Good suggestion. Disconnecting the Ethernet cables from the NICs did not make a difference. However, shutting down the interfaces (e.g ifdown eth0, ifdown eth1) did cut the load average down to nothing (0.00).
So it wasn't actual traffic, but something that the interfaces were doing, or something that was trying to talk to one or both of them.
That's interesting. A few ideas (I'm just trying divide and conquer here -- I don't have a hypothesis):
- See if it's one interface or the other. Does just shutting down
one make a difference?
Nope. If either one is up, I see the load run up. Ethernet connected or not.
- Use tcpdump on the interface to see what's going on there, even
when the cables are disconnected. (I may be wrong about seeing anything when it's disconnected; you may not see any traffic if the driver knows nothing can go out.)
Can't see any traffic with the interfaces up and the Ethernet connected.
- Do "chkconfig --list" to find out which services are on, and shut
them down one by one to see if one is the offender.
I shut off everything, and the problem remained until I at last shut off the network service.
Thanks for the ideas - I'm beginning to suspect a bug in the kernel or the timer code.
--Bill